[PATCH v2 0/4] timer: Improve itimers scalability

Jason Low
2015-10-14T19:07:45Z

While running a database workload on a 16 socket machine, there were
scalability issues related to itimers. The following link contains a
more detailed summary of the issues at the application level.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/8/26/737

Commit 1018016c706f addressed the issue with the thread_group_cputimer
spinlock taking up a significant portion of total run time.
This patch series addresses the secondary issue where a lot of time is
spent trying to acquire the sighand lock. It was found in some cases
that 200+ threads were simultaneously contending for the same sighand
lock, reducing throughput by more than 30%.

With this patch set (along with commit 1018016c706f mentioned above),
the performance hit of itimers almost completely goes away on the
16 socket system.

Jason Low (4):
timer: Optimize fastpath_timer_check()
timer: Check thread timers only when there are active thread timers
timer: Convert cputimer->running to bool
timer: Reduce unnecessary sighand lock contention

include/linux/init_task.h | 3 +-
include/linux/sched.h | 9 ++++--
kernel/fork.c | 2 +-
kernel/time/posix-cpu-timers.c | 63 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-----------
4 files changed, 54 insertions(+), 23 deletions(-)

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1.7.2.5